1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to communication systems. More specifically, an exemplary embodiment of this invention relates to memory sharing in communication systems. Another exemplary embodiment relates to processing or coding resource sharing in a communication system.
2. Description of Related Art
U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,775,320 and 6,778,589 describe DSL systems supporting multiple applications and multiple framer/coder/interleaver FCI blocks (an FCI block is also referred to as a latency path). DSL systems carry applications that have different transmission requirements with regard to, for example, data rate, latency (delay), bit error rate (BER), and the like. For example, video typically requires a low BER (<1E-10) but can tolerate higher latency (>20 ms). Voice, on the other hand, typically requires a low latency (<1 ms) but can tolerate BER (>1E-3).
As described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,775,320, different applications can use different latency paths in order to satisfy the different application requirements of the communication system. As a result a transceiver must support multiple latency paths in order to support applications such as video, Internet access and voice telephony. When implemented in a transceiver, each of the latency paths will have a framer, coder, and interleaver block with different capabilities that depend on the application requirements.